CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 21
Christianity in Thessalonica
1. Philippi to Thessalonica
From philippi paul, silas and timothy journeyed west-by-south-west along the Via Egnatia, through Amphipolis on the Strymon (capital of the first district of Macedonia) and Apollonia, and arrived at Thessalonica, about 90 miles (150 kilometres) distant from Philippi.
The city and port of Thessalonica stood near the earlier city of Therme, which gave its name to the Thermaic Gulf (now the Gulf of Thessaloniki) on the west side of the Chalcidice peninsula. It was founded about 315 B.C. by Cassander, king of Macedonia, who named it after his wife Thessalonica, daughter of Philip II and half-sister of Alexander the Great. Its original residents were the former inhabitants of Therme and some twenty-five other towns or villages in the area, whom Cassander forcibly settled in his new foundation. When the Romans divided Macedonia into four districts in 167 B.C., Thessalonica became the capital of the second district; when they made Macedonia a province in 146 B.C., Thessalonica became the seat of provincial administration. From 42 B.C. it enjoyed the status of a free city, governed by its own politarchs. (This title appears to have been peculiar to the chief magistrates of Macedonian cities; it appears nowhere in Greek literature apart from Acts 17:6, where it is used of the chief magistrates of Thessalonica, but it is amply attested in inscriptions belonging to our period for Thessalonica itself and other Macedonian cities.)1 The Via Egnatia ran through the city from N.W. to S. E., though not along the line of the thoroughfare which bears the same name today.
In the largest city of Macedonia there was naturally a Jewish colony with its synagogue. To the synagogue, then, Paul and his two companions made their way, and for three successive sabbaths Paul expounded the scriptures to the congregation, arguing that they had found their fulfilment in Jesus. Some members of the congregation believed: Jason, who became host to the three missionaries while they were in Thessalonica, was probably one of these. (Jason was, of course, a good Greek name, but it was commonly adopted in the Hellenistic period by Jews whose Hebrew name was Joshua or Jeshua.)2 Aristarchus was evidently another,3 and Secundus may have been a third.4 There were several God-fearers also among those who adhered to Paul; these included the wives of some of the principal citizens of Thessalonica.5
When they were no longer welcome in the synagogue, the missionaries continued their evangelistic activity among the pagans of Thessalonica, and by the time they left the city the Christian community which they had gathered appears to have comprised, in the main, former pagans. This is the inference most readily drawn from the words addressed to them not long afterwards in 1 Thessalonians 1:9, “you turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God”.
But, as the weeks went on, the missionaries found themselves involved in trouble. The principal citizens might have tolerated their wives’ attendance at synagogue: such attendance, in fact, was at this time quite fashionable among ladies of good family in many cities of the Roman Empire, not least in Rome itself. But they would look quite differently on their wives’ association with a very odd collection of enthusiasts who (as it seemed to them) were hypnotized by these strangers who had come to their city from goodness knew where and who (they might be sure) meant no good. It was their wealth that they were after, if not something more discreditable still. That such things were being said is plain from Paul’s apologia in 1 Thessalonians 2:3–12, where he appeals to his converts’ personal memory of his colleagues and himself as evidence that their preaching did not spring “from error or uncleanness” and was not used craftily “as a cloak for greed”. On the contrary, he says, “we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you, while we preached to you the gospel of God”; and he calls them to witness that their behaviour among them was “holy and righteous and blameless”—calculated, indeed, to present to them an example of the Christian way of life.
2. The charge of subversion
The synagogue authorities, for their part, would resent the withdrawal from their services of men and women of repute, and it was not difficult to translate their resentment into action by directing the suspicion of the magistrates against the visitors. With the aid of a gang of idlers around the city marketplace or agora, they fomented a riot. The rioters hoped to lay hands on the visitors and drag them to court but, unable to find them, they contented themselves with doing so to Jason, the visitors’ host, and some other converts. The charge which they pressed against them was extremely serious—much more serious, indeed, than is suggested by its traditional rendering in the King James Version: “These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also” (Acts 17:6). These words have been worn quite smooth by frequent repetition; they have been used as a text by preachers (more especially, perhaps, younger preachers) who have applied them to themselves. But the words imply subversive or seditious activity: “these men who have upset the civilized world have now arrived here, and Jason has harboured them. Their practices are clean contrary to Caesar’s decrees: they are proclaiming a rival emperor,6 Jesus.”
The charge must be set in the context of widespread unrest in the Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire. Jewish freedom-fighters7 were particularly active in Judaea itself during the principate of Claudius, and their activity could not be contained within the frontiers of their native province. A militant messianism was working like a ferment among Jews of the dispersion, and the custodians of law and order in the imperial provinces and cities were not likely to draw a distinction between it and the “messianism” of Paul and his colleagues. In Rome itself there had been trouble of this kind quite recently, so much so that Claudius had expelled the Jewish community from the capital.8 At the beginning of his principate he had sent a severe letter to the citizens of Alexandria where, a short time before, there were fierce and sanguinary riots between the Greek and Jewish communities. In a passage specially intended for the Jewish community, he gave this admonition:
Do not bring in or invite Jews who sail to Alexandria from Syria or down the Nile from other parts of Egypt. If you do, this will make me very suspicious, and I will punish them severely for fomenting a general plague throughout the whole world.9
The immigrant Jews to whom he refers were probably being invited by the Jews of Alexandria to join them so as to augment their strength in the event of further attacks by their Greek neighbours. But “Syria” would include Judaea, and some of the illegal immigrants could have been militant messianists such as disturbed the imperial peace elsewhere; this would account for Claudius’s language about “a general plague throughout the whole world” (and it so happens that the Greek term for “world” in the copy of the emperor’s letter is the same term, oikoumenē, as is used in the charge against Paul and his friends in Acts 17:6).
Paul himself was careful to inculcate respect for imperial law and order, but it could not be denied that, more often than not, his coming to any city was a prelude to rioting and, in particular, that the Jesus whom he proclaimed as sovereign lord had been executed by sentence of a Roman court on a charge of claiming to be king of the Jews. The wording of the charge pressed against him before the Thessalonian politarchs was skilfully thought out.
As for Caesar’s decrees, which he and his companions were alleged to be flouting, these might be understood in a general and comprehensive sense, or (more convincingly) with reference to certain specific decrees.10 The dēmos or civic body of Thessalonica, before which the rioters had hoped to drag Paul and his associates, together with the politarchs, before whom they voiced their complaint, may well have taken an oath, as other cities in various parts of the empire are known to have done, binding themselves to obedience to the emperor: such an oath would empower them, and even require them, to take up such a charge as was now being made. Moreover, in Paul’s preaching in Thessalonica there was apparently a markedly predictive element. His Thessalonian converts, who turned to worship the living and true God, learned also, he says, “to wait for his Son from heaven …, Jesus, our deliverer from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10), and it appears that he taught them in addition something about the way in which world events would unfold up to the parousia of Jesus.11 Now, prediction was an exercise of which one emperor after another disapproved: prediction could too easily be used as a political weapon. Augustus, in A.D. 11, had issued a decree forbidding it;12 this decree was reinforced on pain of death by Tiberius in A.D. 16.13 Paul’s prediction was centred on the one whom he was accused of putting forward as a rival to the emperor in Rome.
3. Paul’s hasty departure
It says much for the sanity of the politarchs that they did not panic when they heard these serious charges. They decided that the heat could be taken out of the situation if they made Jason and his companions go bail for the missionaries’ good behaviour—more particularly, for Paul’s—and this involved his prompt quiet departure from Thessalonica. He left reluctantly, but his hands were tied by the action of his friends, who indeed had little option in the matter. The church which he and his colleagues had just begun to establish required further guidance and teaching for its consolidation, he felt, and he wondered how it would fare in the aftermath of the riot and his enforced departure. That its members would be exposed to some persecution was certain. One can well imagine what the leading citizens would say to their wives who had attached themselves to this new group: “A fine lot these Jewish propagandists are! They come here and entice you to leave the synagogue and follow them, but the moment trouble arises, off they go and leave their dupes to face the music!” Paul knew very well that his converts would be exposed to this sort of ridicule, and in some instances to worse than ridicule, and he made one or two attempts to return to Thessalonica and strengthen them, but these attempts were abortive: “Satan hindered us”, he says (1 Thessalonians 2:18).
If we ask how it could be known which hindrances, like those on the road to Troas, were tokens of divine guidance and which, like the present ones, were evidence of Satanic frustration, the apostolic answer would probably be that those which turned out to further the progress of the gospel and the wellbeing of the churches belonged to the former category and those which worked to the detriment of those causes belonged to the latter. Sometimes, indeed, a visitation of Satan could be recognized—in retrospect, at least—as a means employed or overruled for the furtherance of the divine purpose, as with Paul’s “splinter in the flesh” which followed his ecstatic transportation to paradise.14 But whether the satanic hindrance on this occasion was an illness,15 or a continuation of the political circumstances which had made him leave Thessalonica, he does not seem to have discerned any divine overruling here—not, at any rate, at the time of writing the letter in which those words occur, the letter which has come down to us as 1 Thessalonians.
4. The Thessalonian correspondence
There are two letters in the New Testament addressed to “the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”; the relation between the two is not easy to determine. There is a considerable community of subject-matter between the two, but for the most part the treatment of the common themes is fuller in 1 Thessalonians, Apart from one near-apocalyptic paragraph (2 Thessalonians 2:1–12),16 2 Thessalonians has seemed to many readers to be a pale echo of 1 Thessalonians, and there has therefore been a tendency, especially among German scholars, to dismiss it as unauthentic—but it is difficult to see what purpose any one could have had in view in composing it. Other suggestions have been that 1 Thessalonians was written to Gentile Christians in Thessalonica and 2 Thessalonians to Jewish Christians,17 or that the superscription of both letters, naming “Paul, Silvanus and Timothy” as joint-authors,18 indicates that more than one of them shared in the correspondence. There is really nothing in the two letters which points to diversity of destination, and the idea that a church planted by Paul comprised separate Jewish and Gentile sections is antecedently improbable. “I adjure you by the Lord”, says the writer of 1 Thessalonians (5:27), “that this letter be read to all the brethren”—evidently, then, it was intended for the whole church. And the “I” which forms the grammatical subject of this direction cannot well be distinguished from “I Paul” of 1 Thessalonians 2:18; when the assurance of 2 Thessalonians 3:17, “I Paul write this greeting with my own hand”, is also taken into consideration, the natural conclusion is that, whoever acted as scribe, Paul took personal responsibility for the contents of both letters.
Another possibility is that 2 Thessalonians is the earlier of the two.19 Their traditional sequence implies nothing about relative dating: the arrangement of letters in the Pauline corpus is based mainly on descending order of length. One argument in favour of treating 2 Thessalonians as the earlier letter is that its recipients are described (1:4 f.) as actually enduring persecution for their faith, whereas in 1 Thessalonians 1:6 and 2:14 such persecution is mentioned in the past tense.
Paul’s Thessalonian friends got him safely away by night to Beroea, a city about 60 miles west-by-south-west of Thessalonica; from there he was escorted to Athens. In Athens he was rejoined by Silas and Timothy, whom he immediately sent back to Macedonia—Timothy to Thessalonica and Silas, perhaps, to Philippi. By the time they returned to him, he had moved on from Athens to Corinth.20 If Timothy was given 2 Thessalonians to deliver to the church at Thessalonica, then 1 Thessalonians was written in response to the news which he brought back to Paul in Corinth, answering questions which the Thessalonians had raised during Timothy’s visit, possibly including some which were prompted by the letter which they had received from Timothy’s hands.
The news which Timothy brought from Thessalonica greatly relieved and cheered Paul. Far from being discouraged or disillusioned by recent events, the new Christians in Thessalonica had begun to propagate the gospel on their own initiative, “so that”, as Paul tells them in the letter which he wrote from Corinth on hearing Timothy’s report, “you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia” (1 Thessalonians 1:7). They had had to put up with various degrees of persecution—some petty, some severe—but this had not damped their enthusiasm: “not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything” (1 Thessalonians 1:8).
Even so, Timothy’s report indicated that there were some matters on which they required more explicit teaching than Paul had been able to give them before his hasty departure. They had to be reminded of the importance of sexual purity and the inviolability of the marriage bond—a lesson which converts from Greek paganism frequently had difficulty in learning.21 The eschatological excitement which had infected even Gentile believers was producing excesses, such as a disinclination to carry on with their daily work; why trouble about such matters if the present order of things was about to be wound up? Paul had to refer them to his own example and urge them to do their own work and earn their own living; otherwise they would become spongers and forfeit the respect of outsiders.22
His unfinished instruction about the parousia gave rise to another concern. Some of their number had died already: would they be denied the blessings to be enjoyed by those still living at the parousia? No, says Paul; far from being at a disadvantage, they will have precedence, for when the parousia trumpet sounds, “the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16).23 The expectation of the parousia should not be an excuse for idleness but for vigilance and sobriety, for “the day of the Lord”, he says (echoing a word of Jesus), “will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2).24
5. The day of the Lord and the man of lawlessness
The near-apocalyptic paragraph in 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12, to which reference has already been made, says on the other hand that the day of the Lord will be heralded by certain signs. This has been thought to involve a contradiction so sharp as to rule out the probability that both passages come from one author.25 But it is noteworthy that the same apparent contradiction is found in gospel reports of Jesus’ teaching about the coming of the Son of Man. Whereas in Luke 17:22–3726 it will come as suddenly as a lightning-flash, like the flood in Noah’s day or the storm of fire and brimstone which overwhelmed Sodom and its sister-cities, in Mark 13:5–32 it will be preceded by the worldwide proclamation of the gospel and a time of unprecedented tribulation. Yet the latter passage is followed by a call to keep awake and be on the look-out, “for you do not know when the time will come” (Mark 13:33–37), and the former passage ends with the proverb, “Where the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together” (Luke 17:37)27—which is as much as to say that where there is a situation ripe for judgment, there the judgment will fall. Presumably those whose spiritual eyes and ears were open would recognize that such a situation was present and be prepared for the ensuing judgment. The fact is that in the earliest ascertainable forms of the gospel tradition these two strands—suddenness calling for vigilance and the significance of antecedent events—are interwoven, so that one need not be surprised if they are similarly interwoven in Paul’s teaching.
If 2 Thessalonians was written before 1 Thessalonians, then the statement that the day of the Lord would not come until certain events had taken place might have stimulated the Thessalonian Christians’ concern about the lot of those of their number who died before it came. On the other hand, if 1 Thessalonians was written first, it might have unintentionally provided ammunition for those who argued that, with the coming day so imminent, there was no point in planning or working in the short interval before it came, so that, to cope with this unhealthy argument, Paul might well have said, “The parousia is imminent indeed, but not so imminent as all that: certain things must happen first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–7):
That day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, with the revelation of the man of lawlessness, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Don’t you remember that, when I was still with you, I told you this? And now you know what is restraining him, so that he may be revealed in his proper time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work: only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, but the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by the manifestation of his parousia.
Few passages in the New Testament can boast such a variety of interpretations as this; yet in the historical context its general sense is fairly clear. The verbal imagery is that of the Antichrist expectation.28 Behind the figure of Antichrist, the end-time opponent of God and his people, stands the primaeval dragon of chaos,29 but in Hellenistic times this figure had assumed more personal lineaments with the attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to abolish the worship of the true God and replace it by that of the pagan deity of whom he himself was acclaimed as the earthly manifestation. In the visions of Daniel, Antiochus is the king who is to “exalt himself and magnify himself above every god” (Daniel 11:36), while the pagan apparatus which he instals in the temple is called, by a mocking pun, the “abomination of desolation” (Daniel 11:31, etc.).30 After three years’ profanation, the temple was cleansed and restored to its original function; but the character and action of Antiochus provided a precedent for an expected Antichrist of the future.
In A.D. 40 it looked for a short time as if this expected Antichrist had shown his hand. The Emperor Gaius, who took his divinity very seriously, was stung by what he regarded as insulting conduct on the part of the Jews of Jamnia (in western Palestine) to an altar set up in his honour by their Greek neighbours, and gave orders that his statue should be set up in the Jerusalem temple. The legate of Syria was instructed to see that it was done, and to lead two legions to Jerusalem in case there was a revolt Judaea and the Jewish world in general were thrown into consternation: this was the end, and the Jews steeled themselves to resist the outrageous decree to the death.31
The Jewish Christians were as deeply concerned as all their Jewish brethren. Some of them called to mind certain words of Jesus which appeared to them to have been spoken with direct reference to this crisis. Speaking of trouble in days to come which would herald the destruction of the temple and desolation of Jerusalem, Jesus warned his followers in Judaea to “flee to the mountains” when they saw “the abomination of desolation standing where he ought not” (Mark 13:14).32 (That the “abomination”, though expressed in Greek by a noun in the neuter gender, is to be construed as personal may be inferred from the anomalous masculine form of the participle “standing” which qualifies it.)33 It may well be that at this time these words of Jesus, together with some others of like import, were circulated as a broadsheet among the faithful to prepare them for the impending catastrophe. If so, this broadsheet was subsequently incorporated in the Gospel of Mark.
In the event, the crisis under Gaius proved not to be the fulfilment of Jesus’ prophecy: the decree was countermanded at the last moment. Thirty more years were to pass before the desolation engulfed Jerusalem and its temple. But the crisis made a deep impression on the thinking of the early church, and the prophecy of Jesus supplied a form of words which can be recognized in Christian documents of the following decades, including the passage quoted above from 2 Thessalonians. The crisis had sharpened eschatological expectation among Jews and Christians alike, and made its contribution to the militant messianism which manifested itself in those years in many Jewish communities around the Mediterranean.
The day will come, says Paul, when another potentate will actually do what Gaius planned to do: he will not merely erect his image but occupy a throne personally in the temple, claiming to be the manifestation of the supreme God and exacting divine honours exceeding those paid to any other deity. Great numbers will be hypnotized into giving him the worship he demands, but when he is at the height of his power he will be brought down and destroyed by the parousia of Christ. This will fulfil an ancient word of prophecy about the Messiah: “with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked” (Isaiah 11:4).
6. The restraining power
This sinister being, called Antichrist by other writers, is designated by Paul “the man of lawlessness” because he is the embodiment of lawlessness or anarchy. The “mystery” or hidden power of anarchy had not yet revealed itself in its full malignity. It was already at work beneath the surface, erupting from time to time, as in those forces at Thessalonica which had combined (but fruitlessly, as the event proved) to thwart the progress of the gospel. At present, however, it was checked by a restrainer; but one day this restraint would be removed, and then “the man of lawlessness” would make his debut.
Paul writes as though he expected his readers to understand what he had in mind: he had told them something of this while he was still with them. But to later readers his words have presented an enigma, and even today there is no agreement on their meaning, especially on the identity of the restraining power. One influential view, proposed in the first place by Oscar Cullmann, is that the restraining power was Paul’s own apostolic ministry, which (exhypothesi) had to be completed before the parousia and attendant events took place.34 But if this were so, why should Paul be so allusive, instead of speaking plainly? It is much more probable that the restraint was exercised by imperial law and order, embodied in the emperor—“he who now restrains”. Paul had already begun to appreciate the protection afforded to the gospel by the organization and administration of the Roman Empire, curbing the hostile forces of anarchy. If this is the true interpretation of his words, it is easy to understand his allusiveness. If he had spoken explicitly about the coming removal of the imperial power, or of the emperor himself, and the letter had fallen into the wrong hands, the consequences for Paul and his friends alike could have been serious. Such language would have seemed to confirm the charge brought against him before the Thessalonian politarchs, of contravening the decrees of Caesar and proclaiming a rival emperor.
The near-apocalyptic imagery of this and other passages in Paul’s Thessalonian correspondence is not characteristic of the main body of his writing. In his later letters he deals from time to time with the same topics—resurrection, coming glory, and the subjection of all other authority beneath the dominion of Christ—but he deals with them in other terms.35 Since the Thessalonian letters are among the earliest, if not absolutely the earliest, of his extant writings,36 this may suggest that he came increasingly to feel that apocalyptic imagery was not the most adequate vehicle for expressing the Christian hope.
As for the restraining effect of the imperial order, beneficial as this was for the cause of the gospel, Gaius’s brief spell of madness ten years before had shown what could happen when an emperor took his divinity too seriously: what had happened before could happen again, and indeed would happen again—more decisively and effectively than under Gaius. It is not necessary to think that Paul was thinking specifically of Claudius, although some have (most implausibly) envisaged a concealed play on words between that emperor’s name and the idea of restraint (via such Latin verbs as claudere, “to close”, and claudicare, “to limp”).37 Still less is it necessary to connect the removal of restraint with Claudius’s stepson and eventual successor, Nero (who at this time was only thirteen or fourteen years old). Paul was thinking much more of his own experience of Roman justice: it was on the strength of this experience that he could describe the imperial authorities several years later, when Nero had already been emperor for over two years, as “ministers of God” (Romans 13:6), and it was on the strength of this same experience that, two or three years after that, he appealed to have his case transferred from the jurisdiction of the governor of Judaea to the emperor’s tribunal in Rome.38